So far, we have created a simpler version of what the NextBus website already does. But we have done it in a way that ultimately gives us complete control over the output. Now we want to use this control to go beyond what the NextBus Google Maps mashup does. We'll add another real-time data source that is very important to both travelers and bus-line operators: the weather.
Iowa State University's Mesonet program provides free and polished weather data for applications. We use this data to create a real-time weather map for our bus location map. We can use the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Web Map Service (WMS) standard to request a single image over our area of interest. A WMS is an OGC standard for serving georeferenced map images through the web; they are generated by a map server through an HTTP request.
The Mesonet system provides an excellent web...